The Return of the Native eBook

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its
nightly roll into darkness the great and particular
glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be
said to understand the heath who had not been there
at such a time. It could best be felt when it
could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and
explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours
before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell
its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation
of night, and when night showed itself an apparent
tendency to gravitate together could be perceived
in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch
of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the
evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling
darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.
And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in
the land closed together in a black fraternization
towards which each advanced half-way.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now;
for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath
appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night
its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it
had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries,
through the crises of so many things, that it could
only be imagined to await one last crisis—­the
final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those
who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly
congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and
fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its
issues than the present. Twilight combined with
the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic
without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic
in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The
qualifications which frequently invest the facade of
a prison with far more dignity than is found in the
facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath
a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of
the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects
wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be
not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the
mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than
from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged.
Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct,
to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which
responds to the sort of beauty called charming and
fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of
this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter.
The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule;
human souls may find themselves in closer and closer
harmony with external things wearing a sombreness
distasteful to our race when it was young. The
time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when
the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping
with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.
And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like
Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-gardens
of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and
Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps
to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen.